JPL: Missing ice in 2007 drained out the Nares strait – pushed south by wind where it melted far away from the Arctic

This fits right in to what I’ve been blogging about for two years. the 2007 record minimum ice extent was wind driven not melt driven. A significant portion of the ice did not melt in place. It was pushed south by the wind where it melted.

Large, thick floes of ice can be seen breaking off of the Arctic sea ice cover before entering the Nares Strait in this Dec. 23, 2007 radar image from the European Space Agency's Envisat satellite. Click for large image. Credit: European Space Agency

PASADENA, Calif. – In 2007, the Arctic lost a massive amount of thick, multiyear sea ice, contributing to that year’s record-low extent of Arctic sea ice. A new NASA-led study has found that the record loss that year was due in part to the absence of “ice arches,” naturally-forming, curved ice structures that span the openings between two land points. These arches block sea ice from being pushed by winds or currents through narrow passages and out of the Arctic basin.

Beginning each fall, sea ice spreads across the surface of the Arctic Ocean until it becomes confined by surrounding continents. Only a few passages — including the Fram Strait and Nares Strait — allow sea ice to escape.

“There are a couple of ways to lose Arctic ice: when it flows out and when it melts,” said lead study researcher Ron Kwok of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “We are trying to quantify how much we’re losing by outflow versus melt.”

Kwok and colleagues found that ice arches were missing in 2007 from the Nares Strait, a relatively narrow 30- to 40-kilometer-wide (19- to 25-mile-wide) passage west of Greenland. Without the arches, ice exited freely from the Arctic. The Fram Strait, east of Greenland, is about 400 kilometers (249 miles) wide and is the passage through which most sea ice usually exits the Arctic.

Despite Nares’ narrow width, the team reports that in 2007, ice loss through Nares equaled more than 10 percent of the amount emptied on average each year through the wider Fram Strait.

“Until recently, we didn’t think the small straits were important for ice loss,” Kwok said. The findings were published this month in Geophysical Research Letters.

“One of our most important goals is developing predictive models of Arctic sea ice cover,” said Tom Wagner, cryosphere program manager at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Such models are important not only to understanding changes in the Arctic, but also changes in global and North American climate. Figuring out how ice is lost through the Fram and Nares straits is critical to developing those models.”

To find out more about the ice motion in Nares Strait, the scientists examined a 13-year record of high-resolution radar images from the Canadian RADARSAT and European Envisat satellites. They found that 2007 was a unique year – the only one on record when arches failed to form, allowing ice to flow unobstructed through winter and spring.

The arches usually form at southern and northern points within Nares Strait when big blocks of sea ice try to flow through the strait’s restricted confines, become stuck and are compressed by other ice. This grinds the flow of sea ice to a halt.

“We don’t completely understand the conditions conducive to the formation of these arches,” Kwok said. “We do know that they are temperature-dependent because they only form in winter. So there’s concern that if climate warms, the arches could stop forming.”

To quantify the impact of ice arches on Arctic Ocean ice cover, the team tracked ice motion evident in the 13-year span of satellite radar images. They calculated the area of ice passing through an imaginary line, or “gate,” at the entrance to Nares Strait. Then they incorporated ice thickness data from NASA’s ICESat to estimate the volume lost through Nares.

They found that in 2007, Nares Strait drained the Arctic Ocean of 88,060 square kilometers (34,000 square miles) of sea ice, or a volume of 60 cubic miles. The amount was more than twice the average amount lost through Nares each year between 1997 and 2009.

The ice lost through Nares Strait was some of the thickest and oldest in the Arctic Ocean.

“If indeed these arches are less likely to form in the future, we have to account for the annual ice loss through this narrow passage. Potentially, this could lead to an even more rapid decline in the summer ice extent of the Arctic Ocean,” Kwok said.

“If indeed these arches are less likely to form in the future, we have to account for the annual ice loss through this narrow passage. Potentially, this could lead to an even more rapid decline in the summer ice extent of the Arctic Ocean,” Kwok said.

If I take a whole tray of ice cubes out of my refrigerator and place them in a bucket of water, 2 things happen:
1.) The refrigerator has to work harder to replace the ice
2.) the bucket of water gets much colder as the ice melts.

Now, what do you suppose is the effect of all that ice going south to cool off those oceanic waters?

if a few arches are that important for the arctic ice, increased ice braker traffic may play a significant role as well, which is in large part caused by the explosion of he number of activists travelling to the far north.

Some time ago, someone on WUWT put together and posted a time lapse of the whole Arctic from Oct 07 thru March 08, and the “leak” around the west side of Greenland was very apparent. I don’t have the date, but I downloaded the whole 7 Meg .avi file of AMSR-E 89Ghz images.

This gives us a better idea of why the wind pushed a record amount of ice out to see — given that wind is not a new phenomenon:

“To find out more about the ice motion in Nares Strait, the scientists examined a 13-year record of high-resolution radar images from the Canadian RADARSAT and European Envisat satellites. They found that 2007 was a unique year – the only one on record when arches failed to form, allowing ice to flow unobstructed through winter and spring.”

No arches = lots of ice lost to wind. Why were there no arches?

“We don’t completely understand the conditions conducive to the formation of these arches,” Kwok said. “We do know that they are temperature-dependent because they only form in winter. So there’s concern that if climate warms, the arches could stop forming.”

One more time: “We do know that they are temperature-dependent because they only form in winter.”

There may be some other reason why the arches failed to form, but at first blush, this seems to imply that global warming set the stage for the wind to do its damage.

This flow wouldn’t seem to have contributed much to the summer minimum. The animation seems to commence near the minimum and extend through the winter refreeze. It’s a bit surprising since, as I recall, the rebound after the big low was substantial, apparently despite this additional outflow

“If indeed these arches are less likely to form in the future, we have to account for the annual ice loss through this narrow passage. Potentially, this could lead to an even more rapid decline in the summer ice extent of the Arctic Ocean,”

Hmmmm, 34000 square miles of ice drained out of one strait… that’s not a small number. Begs the question, how much more ice than usual is draining from all straits due to winds? If added back in how would that affect the extent totals? They probably know but aren’t saying.

If the decline in extent is mostly caused by winds and not melt, then it’s not a concern. Increased winds could also bring in warmer air, causing a bit more melt… also not a concern. Kind of sounds like a change in the Arctic Oscillation… (shhh, don’t tell NASA, its a secret.)

Heck, right here on wuwt,we learned that the ice was flushed out by the wind in2007. We saw a beautful movie of it made with nsidc’s own data while they were waxing strongly about a melting arctic and the extinction of ice caps in a few short yrs. Did jpl credit our poster for this discovery?

There may be some other reason why the arches failed to form, but at first blush, this seems to imply that global warming set the stage for the wind to do its damage.

Watch the goal posts move before your eyes.

Isn’t it entertaining to see how warmists will grasp at any straw. I think it’s great psychological insight especially since these arches must not have melted in the same manner for the last two years. It really is hard for some people to admit that AGW has huge flaws and massive uncertainty.

12 Feb: Newsweek: Know Your Conspiracies
NEWSWEEK’s guide to today’s trendiest, hippest, and least likely fringe beliefs
By David A. Graham Newsweek Web Exclusive
2. Anthropogenic global warming is a hoax…
Kernel of Truth? Deniers have long taken advantage of scientists’ cautious statements, and “Climategate” breathed new life into the movement, but the science stands: warming is real, and it’s caused by human actions.http://www.newsweek.com/id/233518?GT1=43002

and the AGW alarmist Lean at the UK Tele:

19 Feb: UK Tele: Green activists are losing their fire
Today’s environmental pressure groups tend to be pusillanimous, policy-wonking and petrified, says Geoffrey Lean
It’s true that these may not have found much to laugh about in the climate rows of the past three months, but their almost complete silence speaks volumes about their lack of courage.
Greenpeace’s executive director, John Sauven, wrote a newspaper article this week calling for “fight” and “leadership” over climate, but his organisation has shown precious little of either. Indeed, two of his top aides have separately told me that the group is “keeping its head down” to avoid Right-wing US politicians capitalising on its involvement. This illustrates the problem precisely. Green groups got obsessed with policy and politicians, and complacent about public opinion, which they took for granted. They became part of the establishment, and let the sceptics take over their former role as insurgents. And they now cannot get their act together to respond.
Yet the gutlessness goes deeper. I have been told by a senior figure at Friends of the Earth that the group should only undertake campaigns where it already has public support. During the 2000 fuel price protests environmentalists ran for cover, losing the argument for green taxes in the process. Shamed, they swore they would never be so cowardly again; but just look at them now.
It’s all about the bottom line. Raising funds has become their most important cause; the planet comes a distant second…http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthcomment/geoffrey-lean/7273163/Green-activists-are-losing-their-fire.html

It looked like the free flow of Ice through that strait happened again in 09. Baffin Bay and the eastern straits emptied their ice in May 09 and Ice was flowing down the strait from the arctic waters for nearly 3 months

Compared to average ice flow this may bring net cooling:
1. Ice melts further south => waters cooler further south
2. Earth albedo higher further south (in NH spring) => more reflection of incoming sunlight
3. Less ice in the arctic => more heat transfer from ocean to air to space in NH winter, but more energy absorbed during NH summer

“We don’t completely understand the conditions conducive to the formation of these arches,” Kwok said. “We do know that they are temperature-dependent because they only form in winter. So there’s concern that if climate warms, the arches could stop forming.”

Without qualifying that statement by an inclusion of comparison of conditions in the atmospheric and Arctic Sea temperature conditions in 2007 vs all other years on record inclusive of presence or absence of the arches each year the above statement is nothing but a reflection of apparent required tenor and bias in relation to AGW.

They only form in winter? DUH !!!!

They should have taken this statement:
“We don’t completely understand the conditions conducive to the formation of these arches,”

“The ice lost through Nares Strait was some of the thickest and oldest in the Arctic Ocean.”

===========
How thick, and how old was it?
Thick enough to sink the Titanic, or was it just thick and “rotten” ice.
I want data. Not scary stories.

Also:
“They found that in 2007, Nares Strait drained the Arctic Ocean of 88,060 square kilometers (34,000 square miles) of sea ice, or a volume of 60 cubic miles. The amount was more than twice the average amount lost through Nares each year between 1997 and 2009.”

========
What did this do to the ocean heat content (Atlantic)?
This is used in the climate models, right?

(I won’t even comment on the last paragraph, which includes the terms: “if indeed”, “less likely”, “potentially” and “even more rapid”).

“While a number of the suits are expected to focus on the EPA’s legal right to regulate emissions and whether or not the Clean Air Act is an appropriate mechanism for curbing greenhouse gas emissions, Virginia attorney general Kenneth T Cuccinelli II indicated the state’s legal action would seek to challenge the findings of climate scientists.”

“… a vivid example of how a small geographic feature can have far-reaching impacts on climate, new research shows that water levels in the Bering Strait helped drive global climate patterns during ice age episodes dating back more than 100,000 years.”

Building a steel “arch” or shorter abutments out from the narrows of the strait would therefore lead to thousand year old ice if that’s what our future depends on would be a heck of a lot cheaper course of action than trillion dollar schemes being proposed by the polical engineers.

Yes, that rotten Global Warming ice.
What else could it be?
Gone with the Wind.
13,900,000 km^2 today, right about average.
Recovered faster than previously expected.
So, much energy did Earth expend blowing the ice out to sea?

The combination of buoy drift paths and ice age clearly shows the “collapse”,one of the few times that oft used word seems truly applicable, of the old ice [up to a decade or more old] which occurred in ’89-’90 as a result of a dramatic shift of state of the Beaufort Gyre and the TransPolar Drift and how the persistence of that new pattern drove the continuing decline in ice age through 2007

You are presenting a simple soluton to the ‘problem’. That is not what the warminsts are looking for.

If you think this a good ‘problem’ to fix; I would recommend that you think more along the lines of using shallow pools of water to create a thin layer of ice in dry, cool conditions (like in ancient Egypt) and then have people carry small coconut thermoses (made in South America) filled with the ice from Africa to the Arctic in many, many wind powered, small bamboo rafts (made in the Philippines). For sustenance they would need organic dried lentils and soybeans (from India) and fair trade tea (from Sri Lanka).

If you could make it a bit more unwieldy, involve even more under-developed countries, have it be more labour intensive, make it take longer and require international co-ordination (from the UN); that would be even better.

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but I know of no climate scientist who has claimed that all or even most ice loss is the result of melting in situ. It melts enough to break apart, then it drifts out to sea where it melts completely. Nobody thinks the Wilkins ice shelf melted away in place.

Much like the fantasy in which Al Gore claims it will never snow again, this is a distortion of the past in order to try and construct a “win.”

I sat there looking at Mann’s temperature graph, admiring the way humanity has kept the temperature trend level for hundreds and hundreds of years, solemnly pondering the sudden and unmistakable rise at the end that shoots up like… well… like the blade of a well-honed hockey stick and then it hit me like a ton of bricks:

THE TIPPING POINT HAS ALREADY HAPPENED!

The epiphany was unmistakable! Yup, folks, I’m SURE of it. That sudden temperature rise isn’t just a preparatory blip; it isn’t a mere perturbation suggesting some impending doom; nor is it some artifact caused by errant data entry or an inverted scale: Without a doubt THE TIPPING POINT HAS COME AND GONE!

We’re all doomed, folks! And there’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle. There’s absolutely no way to undo the Tipping Point. We are had; we’re finished!

We (and I’m speaking collectively for every man, woman, and child on the entire earth) could all hold our breaths for the next hour and a half (that should be sufficient) and even that horrendous self-sacrifice wouldn’t push the tipping point back. Not one bit; nada, nyet, never! We’ll never see a smooth, moderate temperature curve again–EVER!

We could turn off every automobile, truck, ship, train, motorcycle, snow thrower, and power saw and it wouldn’t be enough to reverse it!

We could extinguish every bonfire, barbecue, charcoal kiln and subterranean coal fire and that level of control would still not take us back to where we were!

We could throttle down every gas- and coal-fired power plant (and even those CO2-free nuclear plants for good measure) along with every hydroelectric and geothermal plant and STILL not reverse the Tipping Point!

We could plant every square foot of earth’s arable surface with the most efficient CO2-consuming plants known to mankind, throw away all the asphalt roads along with all that cement and our efforts would be completely futile!

Because folks, if you look at that graph, there’s no going back. There’s no way to undo the terrible injustice we’ve foisted upon ourselves, our kids, our grandkids, our great grandkids, and all our future generations until the sun extinguishes itself and becomes a black, smoldering dwarf star, illuminating the earth like the moon.

Oh, the agony not to have recognized it when it happened! Oh, the wasted time and money researching and discussing something we simply didn’t recognize even though it was so apparent! Oh, the mental anguish of having spent so many intellectual discussions on WUWT debating something that HAS ALREADY HAPPENED!

I’ll never forgive myself.

I should have skied as many glaciers as possible before they all disappeared.

I should have donned ice skates and traversed the North Pole on the last few inches of ice before ice was simply a thing of the past.

I should have pushed together the last remaining snowflakes, now so slushy with rotten heat that making snowmen or snowballs is an impractical, impossible task, just to relive the joy of smacking some unsuspecting, passing person.

I should have sat with my kids and soaked in the few remaining sunsets before the ocean’s mass inexorably took to the skies, rendering them far too dense with fog to ever see the bold splash of colors that used to emblazon the western horizon.

Can someone explain to me why even if all ice is gone in the north pole during summer is catastrophic? I remember watching a nature show some time back on the discovery channel that showed there were over 20 events in the last few million years where there was no polar ice at all for thousands of years at a time, despite this, the earth still spins, and trees still grow.

Robert Wykoff (19:15:11) :
Can someone explain to me why even if all ice is gone in the north pole during summer is catastrophic? I remember watching a nature show some time back on the discovery channel that showed there were over 20 events in the last few million years where there was no polar ice at all for thousands of years at a time, despite this, the earth still spins, and trees still grow.

Good Luck with that question. I’ve posed it about a dozen times to various trolls around here and never did get a response.

tokyoboy (19:12:17) : -I knew DMI would have the straight skinny on the ice extent!
JAXA seems a bit shaky lately.
I was reading this and had the the thought-“Ought to go over to DMI.” Just as I saw your post.

Robert Wykoff (19:15:11) :
Can someone explain to me why even if all ice is gone in the north pole during summer is catastrophic?

1. The penguins would loose there summer breeding ground.
2. Polar bears can not swim and would be go extinct Thursday June 7th 2030 (2 PM GMT).
3. Greece would default and collapse the euro.
4. The increase in fresh water would decrease the salinity of the oceans and thus the density causing all ships to sink because of lack of buoyancy.
5. Russia would invade Canada.
6. Spain would default and collapse the Pound
7. The isostatic rebound in the North would tilt North America and drain the Mississippi.
8. The flood of water from the Mississippi would tear all Big Oil platforms from their moorings.
9. Britain would default and collapse the Ruble.
10. The French might surrender to the penguins.

How much WORSE does it have to get before you understand the seriousness of the PROBLEM !!!!!!!!!!!!

“Observational evidence presented here supports the conclusion of OW that the prevalence of anomalous anticyclonic surface wind anomalies over the Arctic, as observed during the summer of 2007, tends to reduce SIE by producing an anomalous Ekman drift of ice out of the marginal seas and toward the central Arctic. Our JAS SLP index, a measure of the strength of the late summer anticyclonic surface wind anomalies over the Arctic, was more extreme during the record-low ice year 2007 than during any prior year from 1979 onward.”

Excellent post Andrew, still laughing. Just so you know, we in Canada are preparing a pre-emptive strike. We’ve sent the magnetic North Pole into Siberia on a scouting mission. They think its their’s now, its actually a double agent.

But onto controlling the climate… The chain across the straight makes sense but seems a bit crude to me. What I was thinking was tackling the problem at the CO2 level. Now CO2 turns to ice crystals at around -79 C or so. The south pole is almost that cold. So we build a gigantic wind tunnel with a refrigeration coil around it at the south pole. It will take very little energy to run it since the incoming air is already almost cold enough (well except for that gigantic fan). Now we can pull CO2 out of the atmosphere at will and adjust the atmosphere to what ever we want. Now I know what a lot of people are thinking, the CO2 crystals would pile up and we would have a storage problem. I got that figure too. We shovel the stuff into rockets and fire them at Mars. They’ll explode on impact, releasing the CO2 which will cause Mars to warm up. In case we screw up this planet trying to terraform it and doing more harm than good, we’ll have a nice warm planet nearby to move to.

[REPLY – The US won’t be invading Canada in any case. You’ve beaten us twice, so we’ve learned our lesson the hard way. ~ Evan]

“Can someone explain to me why even if all ice is gone in the north pole during summer is catastrophic?”

“Catastrophic” is a loaded framing. Negative consequences include more warming (because of the change in the earth’s albedo) and loss of the habitat and the animals that live there.

“I remember watching a nature show some time back on the discovery channel that showed there were over 20 events in the last few million years where there was no polar ice at all for thousands of years at a time, despite this, the earth still spins, and trees still grow.”

This is a common misconception. Global warming is not going to damage “nature.” The threat is primarily to human civilization. The pole was last ice free tens of thousands of year ago. The earth was not supporting 6 billion human beings. If climate change costs us, say, 75% of our food production, “nature” could not care less. The consequences for human beings would be rather severe, however.

Robert
2010/02/19 at 9:51pm
““I remember watching a nature show some time back on the discovery channel that showed there were over 20 events in the last few million years where there was no polar ice at all for thousands of years at a time, despite this, the earth still spins, and trees still grow.”

This is a common misconception. Global warming is not going to damage “nature.” The threat is primarily to human civilization. The pole was last ice free tens of thousands of year ago. The earth was not supporting 6 billion human beings. If climate change costs us, say, 75% of our food production, “nature” could not care less. The consequences for human beings would be rather severe, however.”

The idea that the north pole has not been ice free for tens of thousands of years is a common misconception of alarmists and others who spend their time hiding from the world in their hug boxes, however as regulars here at WUWT know, this is UTTERLY FALSE. The North pole was open water in 1960 when a US Navy nuclear sub visited the North Pole… photographic evidence abounds…

In 1960, some Soviet scientists proposed that the USA, USSR, and Canada build a dam across the Bering Strait in order to warm up the Arctic and melt the ice:

“Abstract : Today we are publishing an article about a daring project of a Soviet engineer, a laureate of the Stalin Prize P. M. Borisov, who is dreaming of erecting a gigantic dam across Bering Strait and of changing the face of the Arctic: to alter the climate of the Arctic regions, to transform the vast areas of eternal frost on the territory of the United States, the USSR, and Canada into fertile grain fields.”

Once again Steve, you’re simplyfying and cherry picking just to try to stretch the facts to fit your notion of what is happening. If you take the time to read the article you posted, you’ll note how concerned the scientists are that WARMER TEMPERATURES will melt these natural arches across these straits. Yes, the wind blows the ice through the straits, but if the arches are not melted by HEAT, then the ice gets jammed in the straits and can’t get blown any further south. Also, as has been well documented and discussed on many sites, in addtion to the wind pushing ice through these MELTED ice free straits, there were also very high temperatures in the arctic during 2007 as well.

Seems you just can’t accept the fact that the arctic is indeed seeing high temperatures anomalies and the sea ice is trending down up there. The very article you posted worries about higher temps melting away allowing more ice to escape, yet you ignore that part of the equation.

REPLY – The US won’t be invading Canada in any case. You’ve beaten us twice, so we’ve learned our lesson the hard way. ~ Evan]

Wow, what version of history did you read? American history never mentions either incident and Canadian history… well, let’s say some “interpretation of the data” was required. The first incident involved a small (very small) invasion force from the US that assumed the french speaking people would jump at the chance to break away from english canada and support the invasion. They didn’t and the invasion failed. But it was a token force at best. The second incident involved “Canada” invading the United States and marching on Washington and partly burning down the White House. Number of Canadian soldiers? None. It was the British garrison force in Halifax that marched on Washington.

Oh wait… hockey sticks? Did you mean hockey?

[REPLY – The first was Arnold’s attack. A long shot, but would have had a big effect had it succeeded. Then in the War of 1812 there were a number of failed attempts. It was naive to expect the populace to flock to the American cause after the way we had treated the Tories (many of whom had fled to Canada). In any case, invading Canada has been bad luck for the US. ~ Evan

Robert (21:51:38) :
“If climate change costs us, say, 75% of our food production, “nature” could not care less. The consequences for human beings would be rather severe, however.”

If on the other hand the warming increased rain and the growing season in Canada, Europe and Asia (like it has done in the past) and increased our food productions by, say, 75%, “nature” could not care less. The consequences for human beings would be rather uplifting, however.

RE: Dave Wendt (19:45:55) : -> Robert Wykoff (19:15:11) : “Can someone explain to me why even if all ice is gone in the north pole during summer is catastrophic?”

From the environmentalist point of view, I believe that some of them hold the position that all animal species are sacred and mankind has no right to survive if he knowingly destroys, or allows to be destroyed, the special required habitat where many unique arctic animals now live. That is the message of the Polar Bear.

Another issue is predicted rise of sea-level if all the Greenland ice melts and the even more catastrophic rise if some or all of the ground supported Antarctic ice also melts.

RE: Dave Wendt (19:45:55) : -> Robert Wykoff (19:15:11) : “Can someone explain to me why even if all ice is gone in the north pole during summer is catastrophic?”

“From the environmentalist point of view, I believe that some of them hold the position that all animal species are sacred and mankind has no right to survive if he knowingly destroys, or allows to be destroyed, the special required habitat where many unique arctic animals now live. That is the message of the Polar Bear.

Another issue is predicted rise of sea-level if all the Greenland ice melts and the even more catastrophic rise if some or all of the ground supported Antarctic ice also melts.”

Please cite a peer reviewed, data transparent study not published by the Hockey Team, an advocacy group, or funded by an advocacy group (and I regard the UNIPCC and US and British government agencies to be advocacy groups) which actually makes these predictions….

“Can someone explain to me why even if all ice is gone in the north pole during summer is catastrophic?”

A little more on the warming this would cause. I couldn’t find anything calculating the precise positive feedback of the albedo loss from losing the summer ice. I did a very (VERY) rough calculation. (If anyone has the real numbers, please post them):

Arctic ice area (summer, 1979-2000 average): about 7 million sq km (1.4% of the earth’s area)

So . . . over 1.4% of the Earth’s surface (.014), for half the year (.5), you get the difference between .7 (120 W/m^2) and .08 albedo (368 W/m^2) (it’s 248 W/m^2). You get a total forcing of about 1.7 W/m^2.

That’s slightly more than the amount of forcing adding by all the anthropogenic CO2 added to the atmosphere to data, so it’s a potentially large source of positive feedback.

If I take a whole tray of ice cubes out of my refrigerator and place them in a bucket of water, 2 things happen:
1.) The refrigerator has to work harder to replace the ice
2.) the bucket of water gets much colder as the ice melts.

Now, what do you suppose is the effect of all that ice going south to cool off those oceanic waters? “””

Well in mid 2006, a British/Dutch team using a European satellite (presumably polar orbit) announced that after ten years of measuring the level of the arctic ocean, they show it was dropping at 2 mm per year, over that previous 10 years.

They said they were very confident of their data; but didn’t know why that had happened.

If they had read Physics Today for January 2005, they would have found my letetr written actually in mid 2004, in which I predicted that when floating sea ice melts, the sea level should drop; for reasons known to any 8th grade high school science student..

Melting of floating ice requires 80 calories per gram for latent heat of melting, and that can only come from the surrounding water since 9/10 or 10/11 or whatever of the ice is below the surface. So that can cool 80 grams of water by one degree C or one gram by 80 degree C (not likely).

Since salt water of more than 2.47% salinity has a positive temperature coefficient of expansion down to the freezing point, then the sea water must shrink, so the level goes down. If the temperature coefficient was constant with temperature (it isn’t), then the sea level fall, is independent of how much water cools how much. A tall column of water cooling a small amount shrinks the same amount as a shorter column cooling more (for the constant Tc rate.
so when all that ice that went out the gate, finally melted in the warmer waters, the sea level there would go down.

The author of the book whose revue in Physics Today, I was commenting on, responded that I was all wet ( in effect), and added that it was well known that when ocean waters heat up they expand and the level rises.

True (as is the converse) but totally irrelevent to my comment about floating sea ice melting.

“Catastrophic” is a loaded framing. Negative consequences include more warming (because of the change in the earth’s albedo) and loss of the habitat and the animals that live there.

I suggest you venture to YouTube and view some of the videos available there of various bright lights of the climate science community declaiming on the impending disappearance of Arctic ice. From those I’ve bothered to watch, the implied tone is that the prospect should fill us all with incredible dread. And if it’s not really going to be “catastrophic”, why is it continuously used to push incredibly expensive plans to stop it from happening?
Regarding the increased warming from changes in albedo, If the ice does eventually disappear in some future summer it will in all likelihood do so some time in early September, since as this winter has demonstrated the Arctic is perfectly capable of completely refreezing even when the global sat temps are well above average. The thing is, although the Sun is still up around the clock then, about the 23rd of the month it goes down for its annual nap. In the interim it’s circulating at fairly small angles of incidence and if you check the albedo tables for water surfaces you’ll find that at low angles the albedo of water is about the same as new fallen snow. Undoubtedly, there could still be some added warming but it would likely be not greatly significant.
As to the animal habitat, if the polar bears can’t get at the seals, there’ll probably be a goodly assortment of envirowackos floating around on kayaks to supplement their diet. Failing that, as I’ve pointed out in the past, for the price of a couple of good climate science grants we could arrange to have helicopters drop boxes of Omaha steaks on every polar bear in the Arctic for the duration.

I can think of something really bad happening if the sea level were to drop:
Panama and Suez canals idled for starters.
All that cheap Global Seafaring stuff would take a hit.
Sea levels dropping would mean ports in difficulties, and northern sea lanes interdicted with treacherous icebergs.
You don’t know how good you got it until it’s gone.

If the ice in the floe was very old and very thick as stated, and if this is a new circumstance, then perhaps thick old ice doesn’t compact to form arches as does ice normally found there, or perhaps it had sufficient wind driven energy to break up or prevent arches from forming. I don’t see though how ice moving around in subfreezing temperatures can be evidence of global warming. For that to happen you need energy, and at that time of year the lights are out up there.

Perhaps Robert should blame George Bush for this one as warming clearly is not a probability in the dead of arctic winter.

RE: mikelorrey (22:36:11) : “Please cite a peer reviewed, data transparent study not published by the Hockey Team, an advocacy group, or funded by an advocacy group (and I regard the UNIPCC and US and British government agencies to be advocacy groups) which actually makes these predictions….”

My statement was an observation of what I believe others may be thinking based on my general impression of comments I have seen elsewhere…

I have decided to call off the pre-emptive strike against Russia. They have almost 800,000 people in uniform, and we have only 30,000. For starters, we barely have enough barracks for our own soldiers, what are we going to do with 800,000 prisoners of war? Second, I’d need to dedicate 29,996 to gaurd duty which would leave only 4 to deal with the whole Denmark thing.

[Reply – Probably prudent not to get involved in a two-front war. ~ Evan]

These arches form in winter. The winter of 2006-2007 saw more ice than the winter of 2005-2006 did. Spring and Summer 2007 air temperatures were below average. There is nothing to indicate that the lack of ice arch formation was temperature related. It has not happened since and arctic ice is recovering. The 2007 ablation season started with more ice than the 2006 ablation season did. Old ice has been accumulating since 2007.

So far it would seem that 2007 was some sort of fluke and it probably happens from time to time.

George E Smith:
Since salt water of more than 2.47% salinity has a positive temperature coefficient of expansion down to the freezing point, then the sea water must shrink, so the level goes down. If the temperature coefficient was constant with temperature (it isn’t), then the sea level fall, is independent of how much water cools how much>

Not certain I followed that. The amount of water a floating block of ice displaces is equal to the mass of the ice. As the ice melts it becomes water of the same temperature as that it was floating in, so the amount of water displaced by the “melted ice” should equal the amount of water displaced by the actual ice?

Another issue is predicted rise of sea-level if all the Greenland ice melts and the even more catastrophic rise if some or all of the ground supported Antarctic ice also melts.

Given that the mass balance relationship between increased melting and increased precipitation in Greenland is so little understood, I’d say it’s even money whether the Greenland ice sheet would grow or shrink with all that open water available to fuel snowfall. Check out the lake effects snow records for Buffalo.

Like just about everything to do about climate change , it is nearly all about natural cycles and/or events over which we have absolutely no control.

This is just another case of point in that we do not yet really understand more than a very few of the many factors which affect climate. We are fundamentally ignorant about a hugely complex problem, parts of which can be described as ‘chaos theory’.

Rising carbon dioxide levels may or may not play a minor role in the recent small increase in the Earth’s temperature, but this temperature increase is no different from what has been experienced thousands of times previously in the geological past.

For the alarmists, the Arctic ice melt in 2007 was incontrovertible ‘proof’ of AGW. Now that the Arctic ice extent is back to more normal levels – and in a El Nino year! – the alarmists say nothing.

One thing is 100% guaranteed: you will not be reading about these findings in Real Climate or Al Gore’s website.

“If indeed these arches are less likely to form in the future, we have to account for the annual ice loss through this narrow passage. Potentially, this could lead to an even more rapid decline in the summer ice extent of the Arctic Ocean,”

Tipping point?

As my mother used to say If Ifs and ands were pots and pans there’d be no need for tinkers.

“Please cite a peer reviewed, data transparent study not published by the Hockey Team, an advocacy group, or funded by an advocacy group (and I regard the UNIPCC and US and British government agencies to be advocacy groups) which actually makes these predictions….”

I wouldn’t trust the a study from the CSIRO (Australia), either. It seems they have received instructions from Ms Wrong (mis-spelling intentional)

George E. Smith (22:46:09) :
“Since salt water of more than 2.47% salinity has a positive temperature coefficient of expansion down to the freezing point, then the sea water must shrink, so the level goes down.”

Even small changes in the sea water density have an effect on the ocean currents, effect of which can be much larger than expected in the critical areas such as the Labrador Sea.
“Labrador Sea currents tightly govern the strength of the Subpolar gyre’s circulation, which is the engine of the heat transport across the North Atlantic Ocean.”http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/41/83/04/PDF/NATA.pdf

George E. Smith (22:46:09) :
“Since salt water of more than 2.47% salinity has a positive temperature coefficient of expansion down to the freezing point, then the sea water must shrink, so the level goes down.”

Even small changes in the sea water density have an effect on the ocean currents, effect of which can be much larger than expected in the critical areas such as Labrador Sea.
“Labrador Sea currents tightly govern the strength of the Subpolar gyre’s circulation, which is the engine of the heat transport across the North Atlantic Ocean.”http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/41/83/04/PDF/NATA.pdf

davidmhoffer (23:18:27) :
“‘the “melted ice” should equal the amount of water displaced by the actual ice?”

I am not sure about that.

Since the ice contains significantly less salt then the water it is in the ice actually displaces slightly less volume of salt water then the mass equivalent of the fresh water (which is the ice). When it melts, the fresh water combined with the existing salt water, would occupy less volume overall once the salt levels were equalized, since the volume or water has not changed but the density of the salt has diminished.

If you pour a less dense liquid into a more dense liquid the combined volume is less the sum of the two original volumes.

Would this mean that the sea level would actually drop slightly if all the ice melts in the Arctic Ocean?

If so the addition melt water from Greenland could possibly bring it back up to the original level.

We have known for many hundreds of years of the effect that warm currents and winds have on arctic ice. Each generation seems keen on reinventing the wheel, or in the warmists case trying to pretend there was never a wheel in the first place.

All the following references come from my article carried here last year. It demonstates the innumerable records and wealth of documentation collected from the time of the Huidson Bay co in the 1600’s, whalers, sealers, through to scientific expeditions held in the 1820’s to determine the reasons for the arctic ice melting at that time.

“The uncharted coastline of east Greenland became clear of ice around 1820, and in 1822 Scoresby, in the midst of an arduous whaling voyage, sailed along some 400 miles of this inhospitable landscape, charting it, and naming point as he went in honour of scientific and other friends, chief of which was Scoresby Sound, named for his father. Almost all his place names survive today.”

That Scoresby junior was a man to be believed when he claimed that the arctic was melting can be further seen here in this extract;

“Carrying on with great success the most demanding and arduous of all maritime activities -the hunting and capture of whales – he yet collected over a period of some 15 years data on sea currents and temperatures, ice formation and movement, wind directions and velocities, magnetic variations, marine organisms, biology of whales, structure of snow crystals and much besides, gathering all this original work in the historic-volume classic Account of the Arctic Regions. The publication of this work in 1820 marks the beginning of the scientific study of the polar regions.”

There are various interesting observations made by whalers in this book concerning the Arctic conditions;

Within the article are further numerous measurements carried out by brave men who risked their lives to gatrher information that could be used as a direct record of the conditions at the time. They recorded wind directions/velocity, current strength and warmth at the surface and below, disappearing glaciers, and a whole host of other data. They may as well not have bothered.

Do ANY of our modern high profile climate researchers bother to read any history of the subject or do they want to rely on computer models?

“Can someone explain to me why even if all ice is gone in the north pole during summer is catastrophic?”

“A little more on the warming this would cause. I couldn’t find anything calculating the precise positive feedback of the albedo loss from losing the summer ice. I did a very (VERY) rough calculation. (If anyone has the real numbers, please post them):

Arctic ice area (summer, 1979-2000 average): about 7 million sq km (1.4% of the earth’s area)

So . . . over 1.4% of the Earth’s surface (.014), for half the year (.5), you get the difference between .7 (120 W/m^2) and .08 albedo (368 W/m^2) (it’s 248 W/m^2). You get a total forcing of about 1.7 W/m^2.

That’s slightly more than the amount of forcing adding by all the anthropogenic CO2 added to the atmosphere to data, so it’s a potentially large source of positive feedback.”

Interesting calculations Robert, but here is the factor that makes proving AGW so difficult. Clouds!

“Frequent cloud cover, exceeding 80% frequency over much of the Arctic Ocean in July (Serreze and Barry, 2005), reduces the amount of solar radiation that reaches the surface by reflecting much of it before it gets to the surface.”

The world’s most greatest scientific victory in the history of mankind was played out in almost all its entirety in the “Geekosphere”.

Call us what you will, Nerds, Geeks, Poindexters, or whatever. Like Sherlock Holmes or Columbo, we figured out who done it so to speak. We’re not 9/11 truthers or birthers chasing our tails, no, we just concern ourselves with the facts, creating constructs that make sense given all the data.

Do you think we will get any of the credit for exposing the greatest scientific fraud in history?

So it is confirmed that a large unusual event, due to higher than normal winds is the reason for the 2007 low Arctic ice level.

Disappointing, but not surprising that the authors had to add speculation about warming to the end of this generally ‘off message’ report.

History shows that varying and unpredictable nature of the annual Arctic ice melt has little to do with CO2, rather it is a result of the chaotic processes of the polar ‘heat-pump’. Another nail in the CAGW coffin.

RE: Dave Wendt (23:19:51) : “Given that the mass balance relationship between increased melting and increased precipitation in Greenland is so little understood, I’d say it’s even money whether the Greenland ice sheet would grow or shrink with all that open water available to fuel snowfall. Check out the lake effects snow records for Buffalo.”

My personal opinion of total Arctic sea-ice melt is that this event will or will not happen whether we like it or not. Your observation may be correct, depending on the severity of the climate cycle. Hopefully the process, if it were to occur, would be so gradual that we would all be able to adapt to the changes.

If the polar bears were to go extinct, I suspect that similar white-terrain adapted animals would evolve after the next freeze cycle.

I am an editor of a swedish local daily newspaper, the Ystads Allehanda, and I have followed your blogg for some years now. I’t like to get in touch with mr Watts, but fail to find an email adress here at WUWT. The reason is I am about to go to the US and would like to ask him for an interwiev.

‘We don’t know’
Then stop speculating?
Why did the arches not form? The temperture was similar to past years and low enough to create sea ice. So that ain’t the reason.
A structural arch normally fails due to inadequate workmanship or excessive forces.
Easy really when it’s thought through?

TonyB (00:59:50) :
Do ANY of our modern high profile climate researchers bother to read any history of the subject or do they want to rely on computer models?

C’mon Tony! You know the answer already. Why read dusty old reports written by people who have actually been there years past when you can fake model it? They sure as heck don’t wanna go there themselves…might get eaten by one of them vanishing polar bears!

George E. Smith (22:46:09) :
“Since salt water of more than 2.47% salinity has a positive temperature coefficient of expansion down to the freezing point, then the sea water must shrink…”

Any change in the density of sea water (as result of the above) has direct influence on the ocean currents. In critical areas such as the Labrador Sea, effect of even a small change in the currents could be far greater then elsewhere.
“Labrador Sea currents tightly govern the strength of the Subpolar gyre’s circulation, which is the engine of the heat transport across the North Atlantic Ocean.”http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/41/83/04/PDF/NATA.pdf

Ah, yes, 2007; the year of the panic over the disappearing Arctic ice.
Every summer since 1934 the USSR (and now Russia) has serviced its northern ports (Archangel, et al) via the North East Passage. Every summer, that is, except one: 2007. In 2007 winds blew ice onto that northern coast of such a thickness that their nuclear-powered icebreakers could not force through.
2007: the year ice closed the North East Passage. Connection, anyone?

So the ice blew out and melted (cooling the rest of the oceans) and exposing more open water to radiate heat away into space.

Looks to me like a net loss of heat to space.

No problem here.

Oh, and I second the notion that “It’s the ice breakers”… you have a large expanse of thin ice (relative to it’s width) barely anchored to land. Then you chop it all up with giant ships. SURPRISE! it can now drift more easily…

And that quote about the ice arches only forming in winter is priceless. Gee, ice only forms when it’s cold. Who Knew /sarcoff>

Yes, March 17, 1959 is when the picture was taken according to the US Navy. If you are seeking provenace, check out Time Magazine for 1959.
The Sun would be just below the Horizon and it would be dawn all day long.
The Brits have been playing up there almost as long as we have.
So, between the US Navy and Her Majestys’ Navy, there are a lot of vets sitting around cussing Arctic Melters.
I’m waiting for someone to approach a retired crew member screaming it was all a hoax seconds before receiving a Buzz Aldrin moment.

Sort of seems like the extra thermal energy caused the AO pattern to “blow up” and spread diluted cold (less than Arctic normal) southward, as noticed during this NH winter. There are also longer term trends around the Arctic area that have been cited as evidence of global warming, but now look like they could be related to the ocean circulation changes and the subtropical warmth being distributed differently.

Also, hurricanes were way down, indicating the warmth that usually generates them was not there this year. Were the returning currents colder, having lost more heat than usual up North?

A large and complex system full of interesting interactions is slowly being revealed. And we are to accept this has all been accounted for in the CAGW models long ago?

Sea ice albedo: .7
Open water: .08
Summer radiation: 400 Watt/m^2
Duration: 6m/yr
So . . . over 1.4% of the Earth’s surface (.014), for half the year (.5), you get the difference between .7 (120 W/m^2) and .08 albedo (368 W/m^2) (it’s 248 W/m^2). You get a total forcing of about 1.7 W/m^2.
That’s slightly more than the amount of forcing adding by all the anthropogenic CO2 added to the atmosphere to data, so it’s a potentially large source of positive feedback.”

Robert, you are exaggerating again.

Not going to do your math for you but, for one, you forgot your geometry. At pole max ~23.5 deg, you need to integrate over the cap for reflection. See a water refraction / reflection table in ref such as Handbook of Chemistry and Physics. For two, integrate for latitude, it’s not at ~23.5 for half of the year, now integrate that into correction one.

And 400 W/m^2? Maybe at the North Pole at exactly summer solstice and only at noon on a perfectly clear day. North Alaska in July only gets ~208 W/m^2 over a 24 hour period max. What, are you using Wikipedia again?

Note the huge rectangular area of sea ice
cut out of the sea ice by Canadian icebreakers
along the Labrador Newfoundland Quebec coasts–

Follow the red dots–they define this area.

The Canadaian icebreakers will be doing this
slicing of large blocks of sea ice repeatedly many times
over the next few months as the sea ice continues
to grow into the Labrador Sea–

I believe they do this to reduce the sea ice area
(to promote Canada’s AGW agenda) and also to enhance
the flushing effects of currents to clear the
northwest passage earlier and more easily and
thereby to continue to trumpet that canard.
Although this sea ice is probably less than 0.5 meter
in thickness, the continuous repetition of
the icebreakers deliberately slicing it will probably result in
the overall removal of at least 500 thousand
square kilometers of ice over the next few months–
thereby skewing ice measurements and
NW passage opening possibilities–
and has done so for at least the past 2 years–

So, to clear Hudson’s Bay and the NW Passage,
Nares Strait and others,
soon you will notice that
they will also be putting the
red dots from ice breakers into
Hudson’s bay over the next few months.
This sliced sea ice area also might
show up on some satellite photos
(but the red dots will not be in the photos).

Over the next few days you can observe this
current slab of sea ice
as it breaks up while being carried over to
the UK on the remnants of the Gulf Stream.

This type of large scale deliberate ice slicing by
Canada-USA icebreakers
has been ongoing for at least the past 2 years.

So . . . over 1.4% of the Earth’s surface (.014), for half the year (.5), you get the difference between .7 (120 W/m^2) and .08 albedo (368 W/m^2) (it’s 248 W/m^2). You get a total forcing of about 1.7 W/m^2.

That’s slightly more than the amount of forcing adding by all the anthropogenic CO2 added to the atmosphere to data, so it’s a potentially large source of positive feedback.”

And what effect does this exposing 7Msq Km of ocean surface have on loss of surface heat through latent heat of evaporation and convection? Which I’m sure would help in local cloud formation. And the increased Boltzmann radiation from the water’s surface vs ice. How much is that?

You’ve picked up on a number of important indicators there but have not sorted them into sequence to reveal the story.

The 2007 Arctic melt might have been stimulated by the failure of those ice arches but that was at the culmination of 30 years of positive PDO which peaked in 1998. It likely took until 2007 for that peak oceanic warmth in the Pacific to feed around the world to the Arctic. Clearly that also affected Greenland and contributed both to general slight warming of the troposphere and the northward movement of the permafrost boundary.

So far so good but the regime from 1975 to 2005 started to fade from the 1998 peak, jet streams had started to move back equatorward by 2000 and have slowly but erratically continued that movement since.

Now we have the strongly negative AO, generally cooling oceans despite the current El Nino and winter snows occurring in lower latitudes in both hemispheres.

Thus the warming of the earlier years does not seem to be the cause of the negative AO otherwise AO would have not been so persistently positive during the 30 year warming period from 1975 to 2005.

We have to look elsewhere for the cause of the negative AO and since the oceans didn’t do it from 1975 to 2005 I suggest we look up and not down.

Favourite candidate for me is a reduction in the rate of energy loss to space resulting in the current slight warming of the stratosphere which is contrary to the cooling stratosphere of the warming period. That warming of the stratosphere increases the power of the temperature inversion at the tropopause and leads to more intense polar high pressure systems which can then migrate equatorward across mid latitudes forcing the jets back equatorward even in the face of poleward pressure from the current El Nino.

That reduced rate of energy loss to space being associated with the contraction of the upper atmosphere caused by the quieter sun.

During the past warming spell the positive AO allowed faster ejection of oceanic warmth to space so that the warmth from those EL Ninos was not redirected downward in a negative AO.

Now that the rate of energy loss to space is less rapid the energy from the current El Nino was not ejected to space so efficiently and some was redirected downward to reinforce the negative AO that was already in place from the quieter sun.

Very recently, I have been comparing the DMI Polar Temperature plots with the slope of the curve on the Sea ice extent plots.
It seems to me that the DMI temperatures that jog above and below the 42 year daily mean plot predict the jogs in the slope slope of the extent curve. This might make sense especially in the winter when wind and currents may have less impact? Do the temperature readings cover enough area to be meaningful?

Am I imagining something or has anyone followed this possible connectivity for a longer period of time.

I agree with you and kadaka. Now make it about a hundred times more complicated and you’ll about have it.

I particularly liked your point that the Arctic melting was from the PDO in its warm phase, and the time between the onset of the cool phase and 2007 represents the lag time needed by the heat engine that is the earth to pump heat from the tropics poleward.
==============================

Why is anybody using Real Player? What is this ten years ago? Haven’t they heard of Flash? Oh wait it is a university. When someone uploads this to one of the hundreds of flash based video sites let me know. This sort of technological stupidy kills content.

If you want people to watch something provide it in a content format that they easily can (no I do not want to install 20 MB of crappy Real Player). I haven’t had to use that in years.

The current AMSR-E plot shows Arctic sea-ice extent plot value is now about mid-range for all data values recorded this time of year since 2003. This would seem to indicate that we need not worry about all this ice melting away any time soon.

Those ice-bridges would seem to be formed by huge icefloes that were propelled by the wind, tides and coriolis into the strait, and then are grounded.

So the whole icebridge phenomenon must be to do with the clearance between the bottom of icefloes and the seabed. A small reduction in clearance will result in an early grounding, and an increase in clearance would result in no grounding at all, and so no ice-bridge!

Factors controlling the clearance would include water density, ice thickness, seabed slop, and so on. As this phenomenon is ripe with possibilities for speculation/hypotheses etcetera, perhaps it is a suitable subject for a great collaborative piece of ‘blogsphere-science’ ?

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but I know of no climate scientist who has claimed that all or even most ice loss is the result of melting in situ. It melts enough to break apart, then it drifts out to sea where it melts completely. Nobody thinks the Wilkins ice shelf melted away in place.

Much like the fantasy in which Al Gore claims it will never snow again, this is a distortion of the past in order to try and construct a “win.”

It really is funny to see the mental contortions that warmists will subject themselves to when they come across facts that do not support their preconceived beliefs.

Now, young Robert, I wouldn’t want to burst your bubble … but, exactly where did you see anyone claim the opposite of what you stated?

I’m glad I’m not the only one who was disappointed to find that Dr. Lindzen’s latest presentation is encoded in Real Player format. Ugh, what a stupid decision. The only thing I can figure is that they wanted to use the interactive slide feature of Real Player so that when Dr. Lindzen is speaking and clicks on the next slide it pops up in a new browser window. It’s actually sort of annoying because it opens up dozens of browser windows!

Anyway, if you don’t like Real Player (and what’s to like?), remember that you can also download “Real Alternative” and thus avoid all the Junk and Adware that Real Player normally installs:

I would be looking at how the arches form. It is a natural phenomenon, thus the structure will be naturally different each and every time. Weak here, strong there, in a rather chaotic way from year to year. Add warmer currents underneath that naturally show up from time to time. Add a steady wind during formation that naturally shows up from time to time. And what you get is the wonderful infinite variety of nature’s structure building. Nature does not care, if this year, it builds something that isn’t quake proof. It has not and will not read the building codes or fork out money for a building permit. If we don’t like fickle mother nature thumbing it’s nose at how to build something that will last, I suggest we find another planet that has far less variety and live there.

“Another total lie has been that the Sunderbans in Bangladesh are sinking on account of the rise in sea level. The IPCC claimed that one-fifth of Bangladesh will be under water by 2050. Well, it turns out this is an absurd, unscientific and outrageous claim. According to scientists at the Centre for Environmental and Geographical Information Services (Cegis) in Dhaka, its surface area appears to be growing by 20 sq km annually. Cegis has based its results on more than 30 years of satellite imagery. IPCC has not retracted this claim. As far as they are concerned, Bangladesh is a goner by 2050, submerged forever in the Bay of Bengal.”

The Albedo-feedback from the sea ice melting or not melting in the Arctic is very, very small. This has been way over-blown because people haven’t worked through the numbers.

First, the area we are talking about here is that above 75N. The ice already more-or-less melts out in the summer melt season up to 75N. This area above 75N is only 1.7% of the Earth’s surface.

Second, the Albedo above 75N is already pretty low in the summer melt season. Melt ponds and melted snow put the Albedo down to about 0.5 in the summer. It is only the freshly-snow-covered sea ice that has the high Albedos of 0.7 to 0.9.

Even if this ice melts, the Albedo is still going to be 0.3 or so just because of the cloudiness, some remaining ice etc. So the change is only 0.2.

Third, we are only talking about a month or two extra when the ice above 75N will melt. It is still going to be frozen solid well into August and then re-frozen again by early October even in a warmer world.

So overall, if the ice melted out above 75N in mid-August and then refroze in early October, the Earth’s Albedo would only decline by 0.0004 and the solar forcing would only increase by 0.03 watts/metre^2 – much less than that which occurs during a solar cycle. Throw in the ice melting out earlier in the season in the areas below 75N and you could double those numbers – still very little impact.

I can think of something really bad happening if the sea level were to drop:
Panama and Suez canals idled for starters.
All that cheap Global Seafaring stuff would take a hit.
Sea levels dropping would mean ports in difficulties, and northern sea lanes interdicted with treacherous icebergs.
You don’t know how good you got it until it’s gone.
—————
Reply:
Consider the impact the next Ice Age will have on all the above when the sea level drops as much as120 meters like it has in the past!

I’d much rather have open oceans due to a bit of warming than have a significant portion of the ocean’s mass depressing the continents with up to two miles (~3km) of ice!

Ref – wayne (04:08:23)
“Robert, you are exaggerating again.
“Not going to do your math for you but, for one, you forgot your geometry.
“We don’t want to mislead here on WUWT if we can help it, do we?
“And don’t feel alone, your fellow AGWers do it all the time.”
__________________

Open sea
”The beach ridges which we have had dated to about 6000-7000 years ago were shaped by wave activity,” says Astrid Lyså. They are located at the mouth of Independence Fjord in North Greenland, on an open, flat plain facing directly onto the Arctic Ocean. Today, drift ice forms a continuous cover from the land here.
Astrid Lyså says that such old beach formations require that the sea all the way to the North Pole was periodically ice free for a long time.

”This stands in sharp contrast to the present-day situation where only ridges piled up by pack ice are being formed,” she says.

The thing I get is, looking at longer periods, it is really hard to see how global warming could be bad — the system has always exerted a very definite strong downward correction. And even if we were somehow exceed limits, we’re still due for an ice age.

Whether the temperatures go up or down, something somewhere changes.

The irony is the AGW environmentalists and politicians are trying really hard to force changes upon us.

———————————————————-
Last year, I asked about update frequency because there had not been an update between about March to September 2009.

And received this reply from one of the site contacts, Dr Nerem, in September 2009: “We have never updated the site more than 3-4 times a year. A new update should be available by the end of the week.”
(that being in Sept 2009 time reference)
————————

I subsequently checked their web site, and indeed the #version_2009_rel4 data was posted not long after the email.

Comparing the 2009 rel4 data with earlier data from their site, I was surprised to find that, not only were there new appended values in 2009, but also there had been changes made going back through at least the 2008 data. The changes were both – and +, with the largest adjustments ( about + 3 mm) made to already published “barometer not applied” 2009 values. That +3 mm is significant, relative to their published trend line of 3.2 +/- 0.4 mm/year. I do not recall seeing discussion at the web site as to the nature or reasons for those adjustments.

“The IPPC report, of course, is not a PhD thesis – it is supposed to the “gold standard”. Yet what would be unacceptable of a college graduate is deemed by the “climate scientists” of Real Climate to be perfectly acceptable for the IPCC.”

Don Shaw (04:54:27) :
“…It seems to me that the DMI temperatures that jog above and below the 42 year daily mean plot predict the jogs in the slope slope of the extent curve. This might make sense especially in the winter when wind and currents may have less impact…”

Good attempt, Don, but that little blue line near the top of the DMI chart represents the freezing point of water. The Jigs, Jags and jogs you currently see are at least 30 degrees Kelvin below that. At this time of year wind, currents and water temperature are the only explanations for sea ice extent. Air temperature, I’m afraid, has nothing to add.

I would think that such blanket statements need to be put into boundaries. I am thankful there is a greenhouse effect going on right now on this planet. The water vapor, CO2, methane, and the other trace GH gases keep us at a nice moderately warm average global temperature. I wouldn’t want to be a whole lot warmer and I wouldn’t want to be a whole lot colder. The whole AGW issue comes down to this: Can human activity make this nice GH blanket we enjoy too thick, so that we do become a whole lot warmer too fast, like putting too many blankets on top of yourself on a cold winter night and waking up sweating. So fast that food crops, fresh water supplies, ocean fisheries, and the whole web of life can’t keep up and we see some mass species die-off.

But I digress…let’s get back to the issue of what “caused” the extreme summer ice melt of 2007. Was is just wind blowing ice out of the arctic through opened straits free from ice dams? Nope, nothing so simple of course. It was a combination of factors including warm water flowing into the region, high temperatures, high-pressure that lingered months at time, and older thicker ice being calved off and blown or drifting further south to melt. See this chart:

To see the very warm temps in the region during the summer. Now of course the question is, were these high-temps caused by AGW, or, were they part of some natural variation? I think the central issue for many seems to be a reluctance to believe that humans can impact the climate system in any meaningful way. And if the answer is yes, and second issue becomes this: We know that another glacial period would naturally be in the future and due any time for earth I(we are technically still in an “ice age”). So can human activity somehow mitigate these natural cooling that we’re due for? Skeptics remained unconvinced, and the so-called “warmists” say yes. I for one, knowing that the next advance of the glaciers is due any time, hope that we can warm the earth (by putting on that extra blanket) to mitigate or forestall the next advance of the glaciers….and wouldn’t it be ironic if a sudden and rapid cooling really did begin to appear and we we’re suddenly united in our efforts to figure out how to enhance the GW effect? Time will reveal all…

I would be looking at how the arches form. It is a natural phenomenon, thus the structure will be naturally different each and every time. Weak here, strong there, in a rather chaotic way from year to year. Add warmer currents underneath that naturally show up from time to time. Add a steady wind during formation that naturally shows up from time to time. And what you get is the wonderful infinite variety of nature’s structure building. Nature does not care, if this year, it builds something that isn’t quake proof. It has not and will not read the building codes or fork out money for a building permit. If we don’t like fickle mother nature thumbing it’s nose at how to build something that will last, I suggest we find another planet that has far less variety and live there.

There is already a huge amount of information and research done on the formation of ice jams in rivers. Their “ice arches” are simply a new name for an ice jam. The difference being it is in an open sea environment rather than a river. That would imply that they need to look at mechanics which are unique to the ocean (such at tides) and the fact it does not necessarily have a uniform current flow like a river does. Other than those considerations the mechanical process of ice jam formation should be very similar in the Nares Strait to what you would expect in a large river.

Critical elements involved in ice jam formation is the bulk quantity of ice flows at any given time, and the profile of the cross section where the jam tends to form. Ice jams form in areas where the river channel narrows (tending to push the ice together at the constriction point). Once the blocks of ice make contact a natural arch will form if the blocks do not yield to the upstream flow pressure.

I would suggest that the researchers that are investigating this, invite a few hundred folks that work with ice jams every year to take a look at the problem. There is already a great deal of experience and research in existance about how ice behaves under these narrowing channel conditions. No need to re-invent the wheel here.

They might start by talking to the folks at the Corps of Engineers and similar agencies that have been dealing with this sort of problem for the better part of a century in every nation in the world that has navigable waterways in subarctic climates.

There are several hydraulic issues unique to ice jam formation that an experienced ice jam engineer might bring to the investigation.

At the early stages of freeze up, the water begins to develop large quantities of frazil ice (slush) that gradually turns the water into a thick sludge. Combine this with slabs of surface ice floes and anchor ice buildups on the bottom of the channel.

(anchor ice freeze out of ice on the bottom of the channel as super cooled water is mixed down to the bottom of the channel by flow turbulence. Freezing on contact to surfaces. Gradually building up ice from the bottom of the channel)

Once these conditions combine the flow of ice slows and then jams together locking the ice into a solid barrier. The only stable form of that barrier would be in the shape of an arch.

I would think that such blanket statements need to be put into boundaries. I am thankful there is a greenhouse effect going on right now on this planet. The water vapor, CO2, methane, and the other trace GH gases keep us at a nice moderately warm average global temperature. I wouldn’t want to be a whole lot warmer and I wouldn’t want to be a whole lot colder.
—————-
Reply:
What you want is irrelevant and unobtainable (with due respects).

First, I didn’t make a blanket statement such as “It will be warm forever”. As a geologist I can tell you earth’s climate change is far more intense than the vast majority of AGWers would have us believe (otherwise it quickly shoots down their hypothesis and renders their hysteria meaningless).

Simply look at the geological record to see what Mother Nature has provided; I’m absolutely convinced that what man can do TO the climate and what man can do to REGULATE the climate is 4 to 5 orders of magnitude LESS than the natural forces than control the climate. In other words, essentially meaningless in the grand scheme of things.

You or your kids or your kid’s kids (i.e., somewhere down the line) ARE going to see the next Ice Age. It’s a given and it ain’t gonna be pretty. It’s not as predictable as clockwork on our timescale, say within one generation or one lifetime, but it is inevitable. I’m too much of a believer in “the past predicts the future” and catastrophic uniformitarianism (or is it “uniform catastrophism”) to ever be convinced otherwise.

But like you say, time will reveal all.

It’s just not going to be a smooth ride forever. It only could be if man could control the earth’s thermometer, and that supposition is simply laughable.

I’m just glad we are (or is it were?) in a warming trend. If man’s contribution to CO2, which adds abundantly and beneficially to the biosphere, is in some small way helping that out, I’m all for it.

Interesting idea. Do you have documentation other than the chart? There would have to a ton of documentation on the ships, their current locations and missions, metrics (miles of sea-lane opened, distance traveled, etc.) position papers, policies… (e.g. we are committed to keeping the Passage open 10 months of the year…) I did a quick check and was a bit surprised at how many icebreakers Arctic nations had and that there were a goodly number in private hands…. including Greenpeace (anyone know where the Arctic Sunrise is now? Inquiring minds and all that…)

Lopping a half-million square kilometers off the pack would rather bugger the metrics, don’t you think?

As a geologist, the main thing that bothers me with this whole AGW mantra is how counterintuitive it is. And the reason is because climate change is the modus operandi of the earth. The only constant about climate change is change. It gets warmer, and it gets colder; it is cyclical. And there are temperature cycles as short as a day and as long as 100 million years or more. There are cycles opon cycles upon cycles upon cycles.

To believe that somehow what man is contributing to GHGs will tip us over the edge is hardly convincing considering we’re seeing a small blip at the bottom of the CO2 curve, which has been 10 times higher in the past; certainly we’re not on a CO2 peak.

So we’re told we are facing hysterical warming yet the thumbscrews they want to apply destroy our ability to survive.

The recommended approach is to shut down any device, large or small, that puts CO2 into the atmosphere. There goes our ability to keep ourselves warm, fed, housed, clothed, transported, entertained, educated, proliferating, propagating and capitalized.

For some reason, they abandon proven alternatives like nuclear, hydro, and geothermal. Reliance on wind and solar is folly; they are unreliable. Don’t you dare say “drill, baby, drill”–you’ll be a candidate for the insane asylum.

It flat out doesn’t make sense; it does not compute; it is completely illogical.

Larry,
Thanks for the explanation!
I was curious at to any studies regarding causes for the arch to fail? Obviously sufficient warming would weaken it. But arches are notorious for being very strong one way, very weak the other. Would strong wave action for example, pushing against the inside of the arch fracture it and collapse it? Or strong wind for that matter? Neither seems likely with the amount of ice jammed up against the outside of the arch which would tend to stabilize it against anything but a really big force.

@Stefan: “The thing I get is, looking at longer periods, it is really hard to see how global warming could be bad”

Oh, I don’t know. Global warming is now thought to be the proximate cause of the Permian–Triassic extinction event, which wiped out 96% of marine species, 70% percent of terrestrial vertebrates, and was the only known mass extinction of insects. Fifty-seven percent of all families and 83% of all genera were killed.

R. Gates (09:20:51) :
Oh, and by the way, global tropospheric surface temps are a full one degree warmer right now than this time last year:>

LOL. One channel, and degrees F and only one day on one year. Channel 10 is only 0.05 F and is no more meaningfull than just channel 5. Lets turn on all the channels for all the years:

13 – lower 1/3 of all years
12 – lower 1/3 of all years
11 – no data
10 – bottom of of all years
09 – lower 1/3 of all years
08 – top 1/3 of all years
07 – top 1/3 of all years
06 – middle of pack of all years
05 – top of pack of all years
04 – top of pack of all years

what to conclude from this? fluctuations exist and some things are getting warmer and some cooler.

We know that another glacial period would naturally be in the future and due any time for earth I(we are technically still in an “ice age”).

We are still in an ice age? We have been told recently we have the hottest years “on record” and also often told they are the hottest “ever.” We likewise have the “hottest decade,” etc. It is so hot all the glaciers are melting, the Arctic will be ice free, even the Antarctic will melt, and we may well all drown!

All this heat and we still are not out of the last ice age? So when are we ever going to be out of the current one? Unprecedented high temperatures, all the fault of mankind, and still it is not enough to get us out of an ice age? How can this planet have ever gotten out of any ice age if this unprecedented warmth won’t do it?

Truly, this CAGW theory can be most difficult to follow. One may think it makes no sense at all!

Your link only goes back to sarellite records commencing in 1979. Try some of the books written in 1820 or Hudson Bay Co records going back to the 1600’s. They show enormous fluctuation in ice area to levels greater than and less than today. You can’t look at a 30 year chart and draw any meaningful conclusions.

This links to the first part of my post (TonyB 00:59:50) which leads to the various historic books. :

“We have known for many hundreds of years of the effect that warm currents and winds have on arctic ice. Each generation seems keen on reinventing the wheel, or in the warmists case trying to pretend there was never a wheel in the first place.

All the following references come from my article carried here last year. It demonstates the innumerable records and wealth of documentation collected from the time of the Huidson Bay co in the 1600’s, whalers, sealers, through to scientific expeditions held in the 1820’s to determine the reasons for the arctic ice melting at that time.

Poptech (00:33:29, 20/02):
re: Historically ice loss in the Arctic is nothing new” with a link to a report on less ice 6000-7000 years ago. I noticed that report when it came out, which was based (as many of these are) on a press release (Oct. 2008). I have since periodically looked for a peer-reviewed paper describing this study but have not found one. I looked again today, same result. If anyone knows of an actual paper, it would be nice to know. Otherwise, as far as I am concerned, that report remains in the realm of anecdote.

However, this reference suggests no evidence for an ice-free winter (ie. complete loss of perennial ice) within the last 14 million yrs:
“Arctic perennial ice cover over the last 14 million years.” Dennis A. Darby. Paleoceanography, Vol. 23, PA1S07, doi:10.1029/2007PA001479, 2008.

” Arctic sea ice is disappearing much more rapidly than the models predicted.”

You seem to be missing one large and fairly obvious point. Whether the models are in error in a direction that supports or contradicts one’s point of view doesn’t prove anything, except that in almost all cases the models are wrong.
Being wrong in a direction we prefer is just as much a reason to ignore them as the opposite case.

Davidmhoffer: REPLY – The US won’t be invading Canada in any case. You’ve beaten us twice, so we’ve learned our lesson the hard way. ~ Evan]

“Wow, what version of history did you read? American history never mentions either incident and Canadian history…”

A funny little snippet from a fur trader’s journal (David Thompson) from 2 August 1812 when he was at Fort William about the taking of Michilimackinac Island:

At 2 pm, the Invincible arrived and passengers in her Messrs McGillis, Rocheblave, Jo Mcdonnel, Guideke, Simpson and Holmes &c. They bring the agreeable news that Mishelamakanac was taken the 17th July by Capt. Roberts, 40 regulars and 2-6 lb guns, aided by 260 Canadians under Messrs Crawford, Dixon and Potier [Porter], aided by about 450 Indians of different tribes. The place surrendered at discretion without firing a shot and the Indians we withheld from blood, but as they could not get the American scalps, they insisted upon having their hats.

You seem to be missing one large and fairly obvious point. Whether the models are in error in a direction that supports or contradicts one’s point of view doesn’t prove anything, except that in almost all cases the models are wrong.
Being wrong in a direction we prefer is just as much a reason to ignore them as the opposite case.”

Scientific predictions are not like Biblical prophecy — absolute truth, or the lies of the devil. They are estimates, based on physics and math, and every input has an error bar, and every model — from climate science to Newtonian mechanics — has a limited ability to predict the real world, because the real world is always more complicated than the model.

Should we ignore the model because it doesn’t tell us everything and is sometimes off? I don’t know. Should we ignore a doctor who tells us our child’s fever is likely to go up to 103-104, and it goes to 106 instead? Should we refuse antibiotics because the doctor clearly doesn’t know what’s going to happen?

We know that another glacial period would naturally be in the future and due any time for earth I(we are technically still in an “ice age”).

We are still in an ice age? […]”

kadaka, you have to admit that in this case, R. Gates makes a lot of sense. We are in an interglacial period in an ice age epoche. It should also be pointed out that R. Gates has repeatedly stated that his objective is to “not believe propaganda from either side”, i paraphrase that from memory…

Should we ignore a doctor who tells us our child’s fever is likely to go up to 103-104, and it goes to 106 instead? Should we refuse antibiotics because the doctor clearly doesn’t know what’s going to happen?>

When the doctor tells me the kid’s fever is going up, I listen. When he starts telling me that the only cure is to buy antiobiotics from a drugstore that he owns, I start to get suspicious. When the kid’s fever starts to go down on its own before I even buy the antibiotics, I start to get even more suspicious. When he insists that HIS thermometer shows that the kids fever is still going up even though mine says it is going down, and then he refuses to even show me his thermometer to see for myself, and then one of his colleagues pipes up and tells me the doctor doesn’t even HAVE a thermometer, I get very very very suspicious. When he starts to tell me that the fever will cause my kid to spontaneously combust while the kid is running around healthy as a horse and has no fever at all…. and the doctor STILL wants me to spend huge amounts of money at HIS drugstore….

Don Shaw (04:54:27) :
“…It seems to me that the DMI temperatures that jog above and below the 42 year daily mean plot predict the jogs in the slope slope of the extent curve. This might make sense especially in the winter when wind and currents may have less impact…”

Good attempt, Don, but that little blue line near the top of the DMI chart represents the freezing point of water. The Jigs, Jags and jogs you currently see are at least 30 degrees Kelvin below that. At this time of year wind, currents and water temperature are the only explanations for sea ice extent. Air temperature, I’m afraid, has nothing to add.

Robert, appreciate your comments. Upon further reflection some questions/observations come to mind as follows
1) The DMI temperature plot shows the mean temperature above 80 degrees north parallel.
2) Most likely there is a temperature gradient between the 80th parallel and the north pole that on average the temperature is reduced as the measurement point is located further north.
3) I suspect that the temperature at the edge of the reported ice extent is above the currently reported mean of 245 K and is much closer to freezing which is 273.1 K than 245K.
4) What is the typical temperature at the edge of the extent?
5) The recent jogs around the mean temperature approach 13 degrees. I would be surprised if such a large temperature change would not affect the ice extent, but that is the essence of my question.
6) Surely other factors affect the freezing of the sea such as wind.
7) My observations from watching lagoons freeze over in the winter is that during a strong wind, the waves that form cause a mixing of the surface water with warmer water below the surface and prevent freezing. My experience is with mini waves and I expect the waves in the arctic could be huge and more dramatic. It seems to me that the freezing of the surface water in the lagoon starts overnight when the wind is less.

I perfectly agree. Took me ten minutes just to get it to play. But, It’s Femilab and gov’t up-to-date computer systems is not usually there. But the words are great. Just ignore the hangs in the video (don’t try, those pauses in the video portion ill not go away, I tried)!

@Stefan: “The thing I get is, looking at longer periods, it is really hard to see how global warming could be bad”

Oh, I don’t know. Global warming is now thought to be the proximate cause of the Permian–Triassic extinction event, which wiped out 96% of marine species, 70% percent of terrestrial vertebrates, and was the only known mass extinction of insects. Fifty-seven percent of all families and 83% of all genera were killed.
…
I would say that meets the definition of “bad.”
————–
Reply:
You’re grasping at straws, Robert. Truly grasping.
Of all the reasons for the P/T extinction event, I’d say the least tenable is global warming because, as they project in your refrences, it “caused changes in oceanic currents.”

How about considering the splitting of the supercontinent (Pangaea) to FORM the Atlantic at that time as a much bigger driver of changes in oceanic currents? Heck, before the Atlantic existed there weren’t even any ocean currents IN the Atlantic! Certainly that would be a bigger factor than whether sea water was another degree or two warmer.

There are much better mechanisms for driving extinction events (large and small) and much better geologic evidence such as impact events (the Gulf of Mexico astroblem for this extinction, among other astroblems), volcanism (plate tectonics was going stronger back then than it is now), and even methane hydrate gassification, kicked off by a very large lava flow into the ocean.

But “global warming”? Each of the above more plausible explanations would have warmed things up and it was perhaps a component, but it wasn’t the heat that brough down the asteroids from heaven nor did it speed up separation of the plates. And it certainly didn’t melt the lava flow that warmed up the methane hydrates to volatility.

It could likely have been a combination of all three events (it apparently didn’t happen overnight), although the Big-5 Extinctions are just about as bad as this one.

No, it is doubtful “global warming” was the causitive factor, and didn’t trigger the tipping point for the P/T extinction event. If by “proximate cause” you mean the earth warmed up from volcanism/impact/lava flows that is indeed a likely outcome, but it wasn’t the predominant reason by any means in my humble professional opinion. Just like CO2 now being a “proximate cause” of current warming with a contribution of perhaps 3-5% of the total.

D. King (11:38:37) :
D. King (11:59:33) :
Thanks. On first view I didn’t realize the ice being addressed was the medium grey and smooth portion in the photos, not the white. Your addition makes it perfect clear, basically a river of ice.

Well the Nares straight arches or bridges really collapsed in 2009, so much so that it was noted in MODIS images by the Canadian ice service. Yet 2009 summer minimum was higher than 2007. This shows ice flow out of the Nares straight has minimum amount of impact on the amount of melt on the Siberian side, where most of this is happening.

The massive melt in 2007 was down to wind patterns, but it was warm winds from Siberia melting it in situe and pushing it together, as well as clear sunny warm days.

Don Shaw, I agree with your last point. I have been stranded in the arctic while on a canoe trip waiting for the ice in a large lake to clear (days 20 to 23 of 60). Despite 80+ degree days we had to wait three days until a strong NW wind cleared the ice by pushing it onto the shore of the island we were marooned on (amazing to watch the slow but steady push of slabs, some 3 feet thick, sliding onto the beach). Below the treeline, the warm temps had sped up the melting—all the lakes we had traversed up to that point in the trees were clear of ice—but with no trees on the shore to trap and hold the warmer air, it’s wind alone that clears the lakes north of 60.

Yeah, I think not. In fact you posit warming as a likely cause of the extinctions, but attribute it to “lava flows/volcanism/impact” (talk about grasping at straws!)

I can only suggest you read what the paleoclimatologists have to say on the subject. The real scientists paint a very different picture of the Permian–Triassic extinction event than your wishful thinking here.

[snip – I’m tired of these baseless claims that somehow all skeptics are in the employ of oil companies, I’m certainly not. Nobody with skeptical views that I know is. Since you have nothing to offer but innuendo from the comfort of relative anonymity, while I and other skeptics put our names to our words, I kindly suggest you shut the hell up. – Anthony]

It’s a complaint about terminology. People know what an ice age is, and know we are not in one. We freely talk here about how we are overdue and will eventually enter a new one. Yes, we are in an ice age epoch, but that is freely understood as a long period of ice ages. So what point is there in saying we are technically still in an “ice age”, other than to attempt to convey a sense of some sort of “smarter-than-thou” smug scientific superiority?

Scientific predictions are not like Biblical prophecy — absolute truth, or the lies of the devil. They are estimates, based on physics and math, and every input has an error bar, and every model — from climate science to Newtonian mechanics — has a limited ability to predict the real world, because the real world is always more complicated than the model.

You may may finally have arrived at something we can both agree on. I have been digging through the pile of sludge that is “climate science” trying to find nuggets of truth since long before this or any other blog existed. I began as a skeptic and remain so because throughout that search the uncertainties have been mostly ignored, and even when credited they’ve been vastly underestimated. This is present on both sides, but I’ve ended up spending more time than I can really afford on this site because people like Anthony, Lindzen, Spencer, Christy, MacIntyre, et al, have all at least demonstrated the humility to admit what they do not know.
In the end this quandary is essentially a problem of epistemology. How does a rational person choose to believe what he chooses to believe, know what he thinks he knows? Way back in my formative years I was exposed to the works of Michael Polanyi. Until I recently spent some time thinking about these questions, I hadn’t really credited what a profound effect that exposure had on my mental outlook. I still think his books “Personal Knowledge” and “Meaning” are the best explorations of the topic I’ve ever encountered and would recommend them highly to anyone looking to learn how their own mind really works.

Ice jams would form (and yes I have seen them) at different part of the narrow depending on the current and wind present at the time of the formation. Therefore it would still be unique in that some areas would lead to a more robust jam (IE longer lasting) than at other times. I stand by my statement. It should be rather highly variable each time it forms. Which is different from a flat shelf bridge.

Good points. Keep in mind that the DMI temperature chart covers only the area above 80 degrees North, but the ice can extend as far south as the 60th parallel, so I probably spoke up too quickly earlier: the air temperatures at the edge of the ice might well be different. In a sensem you are asking if the DMI product might not be a good “proxy” for the entire ice area. I’d suggest that the increase and decrease in ice extent are the results of “local” conditions that have little if any effect above the 80th. It might be more to the point to determine where the changes in extent are occuring and check the temperature, wind and current conditions for that area…. and ice-breaker activity, as well, if Mike Odin’s suggestion earlier is really valid.

Now, having climbed out on this branch, some one with more familiarity with this might want to chime in… but don’t hand me a chain-saw please!

[snip – I’m tired of these baseless claims that somehow all skeptics are in the employ of oil companies, I’m certainly not. >

Mods permitting….
Some time ago I posted my artificial intelligence simulation of the information exchange between a physicist and an IPCC climatologist. Despite repeated end state corruption in the simulation, it was well recieved. I’ve now taken the extra step and simulated an information exchange between an IPCC Climatologist and Big Oil. Big Oil turned out to be hard to simulate as an average, and I had to break it up into several simulations by geographical range. A bit long to post here (but happy to if asked) so here’s the link. Sorry, but that end state corruption loop showed up again. Don’t get mad…. just laugh

“Well, we break through it, yes. In areas like Peel Sound,
where you would find those three types of ice, the ship has been
tasked to go through and break for a variety of different reasons.
In 1999, we were in a really tough area where in about 24-hours
the vessel made about 5.6 kilometres. It took us a couple of days
to get through a ridge that was very hard. We had all five engines
online and we burned about 100 tonnes of fuel. We can’t do
that for an extended period.”

Peel Sound–a couple of days to
get through an ice ridge–

Perhaps Mother Nature would
have taken quite a bit longer to get
through that ridge unassisted and possibly
no ice flushing would have occurred at all
that year or in subsequent years–
the captain of this icebreaker certainly
did not think the ridge would clear
without his assistance.

It certainly indicates that there was less ice in the 1940’s
when easy transits were made with leaky scows
and no navigational satellites mapping ice.
It does not now sound like rotten ice
to me–
but maybe after 10 years of yearly smashing by icebreakers
the ice ridges in Peel Sound and elsewhere
now no longer form very robust ice arches.

Likewise it must be assumed that Canada ice breakers
have been and are tasked with
clearing ice ridges in Nares Strait and elsewhere–
after all, keeping these passages navigable
is the assignment of the icebreakers–

And the returning icebreakers
bring with them the little red dots
(indicators of sliced ice) which begin
to proliferate from March to May
every year in the Labrador sea and
migrating to Hudson’s Bay–
the red dots form straight lines or smooth
geometric curves(nature abhors smooth or straight lines)
and invariably slice off large
(thousands of square kilometres) hunks
of sea ice.
I have observed this process repeat
in March April and May
over the past 2 years–

and by making daily observtions of the labrador Sea
Hudson’s Bay area, it soon becomes obvious that no other
factor can account
for straight or curved red dotted lines
repeatedly and almost daily appearing–
which occur nowhere else
(except at some Russian icebreaker areas)
and which result in large sheets of sea ice separating out along
those red dotted lines
and then drifting off into the Gulf Stream remnants.

So you too can observe this process by watching
the above link daily (unless you trust the archives)–
or if you find daily observation of detail boring
you might choose to examine
some of the March -May archives-

Here are a couple of animations that might interest you-
Unfortunately they cannot be slowed or enlarged.

Robert (15:48:13) :
[snip – I’m tired of these baseless claims that somehow all skeptics are in the employ of oil companies, I’m certainly not. Nobody with skeptical views that I know is. Since you have nothing to offer but innuendo from the comfort of relative anonymity, while I and other skeptics put our names to our words, I kindly suggest you shut the hell up. – Anthony]

I was at the gas station the other day and they gave me a coupon for 4 cents off a gallon, does that count?

The Siberian Traps volcanic events (the largest volcanic events known about) likely caused the Permian extinction.

The latest paper (by all the experts on the event) resolving the timelines and the extent of the volcanism place it starting just before the Permian extinction with enough impact to cause the extinction (over 5 million km2 (65% of the size of the continental US) were covered by magma up to 3.5 kms deep).

The isotope data covering the timeline has high enough resolution to indicate there was a sharp down-spike in temperatures at the time, 5C or so, versus a global warming event as asserted by the pro-AGW set.

But a conference presentation is not a peer-reviewed paper, where one can assess the data and methods to determine if the results are plausible. I would need to see that level of detail before I was convinced. A printed abstract is not the same thing at all.

Don Shaw (17:07:19) :
Yeah, I look at the DMI, IJIS and Arctic Roos charts everyday, too and often wonder just what it all means. It’s been a bit snowier here in Southern New England but the temperatures haven’t really been that much to complain about and Long Island Sound has yet to freeze over.

Mike Odin (17:18:05) :
Interesting stuff. It looks like you’ve been doing your homework. It would be fascinating to see hard figures for how much of the ice is actually broken each year and how it affects the charts published by IJIS and the others…. a kind of “…this is what the extent would be like without our efforts…” using arctic sea-ice coverage as a measure of the effects of global warming would be, as you’ve been pointing out, rendered invalid and useless by our efforts to eliminate that ice. Since it is the job of the CCGS to eliminate ice, I’m sure there must be a nice series of reports somewhere detailing just how successful they are in doing their jobs.

Mike Odin (04:17:53) :“I believe they do this to reduce the sea ice area
(to promote Canada’s AGW agenda) and also to enhance
the flushing effects of currents to clear the
northwest passage earlier and more easily and
thereby to continue to trumpet that canard.
Although this sea ice is probably less than 0.5 meter
in thickness, the continuous repetition of
the icebreakers deliberately slicing it will probably result in
the overall removal of at least 500 thousand
square kilometers of ice over the next few months–
thereby skewing ice measurements and
NW passage opening possibilities–
and has done so for at least the past 2 years–”

Thanks, Mike, for a useful and interesting post. There are massive benefits to USA, Canada, Russia and other countries bordering the Arctic if it became ice free. I’ve seen estimates that 25% of the worlds oil lies under the Arctic, so all these countries have a vested interest in ‘encouraging’ the ice to leave. The following article is interesting, as it indicates a rapid growth of ice-breakers.

Polar Icebreakers in a Changing World
“Commercial vessel transits typically encompass cargo vessels transiting either the Northern Sea Route (above Russia) or the Northwest Passage (above Canada) or the delivery of supplies to Arctic destinations along either of those routes. In 2004, $4.5 billion dollars worth of orders were placed for the construction of ice class tankers. Additionally, the ice class tanker fleet will grow by 18 million deadweight tons (dwt) by 2008; 262 ice class ships are presently in service and another 234 are on order (ABS, 2005).”

WASHINGTON – Top researchers now agree that the world is likely to get stronger but fewer hurricanes in the future because of global warming, seeming to settle a scientific debate on the subject. But they say there’s not enough evidence yet to tell whether that effect has already begun.

Here’s another quote from from Kowk:
“”We do know that they are temperature-dependent because they only form in winter. So there’s concern that if climate warms, the arches could stop forming.”
So, they are indeed temperature dependent. Please quote the thoughts of scientists in full.

davidmhoffer (10:55:35) :
LOL. One channel, and degrees F and only one day on one year. Channel 10 is only 0.05 F and is no more meaningfull than just channel 5. Lets turn on all the channels for all the years:

13 – lower 1/3 of all years
12 – lower 1/3 of all years
11 – no data
10 – bottom of of all years
09 – lower 1/3 of all years
08 – top 1/3 of all years
07 – top 1/3 of all years
06 – middle of pack of all years
05 – top of pack of all years
04 – top of pack of all years

what to conclude from this? fluctuations exist and some things are getting warmer and some cooler.

That the troposphere is warming and the stratosphere is cooling as you’d expect from increasing GH gases.

By the title of this thread is rather extreme, a more accurate one would be:
“JPL: Missing ice in 2007 drained out the Nares strait – pushed south by wind where it melted far away from the Arctic it melted in the Baffin Sea.

It appears that the Nares Strait arch has not formed this winter either judging from these images:

From the same source in Aug 2007:This amount of ice clustering, containing old ice, along the Newfoundland/ Labrador coast does not happen very often. Normally an ice bridge forms in Nares Strait during the month of January and acts as a plug for the old ice in the Arctic Ocean, preventing it from drifting southward all the way down into Newfoundland waters.

However, this year the bridge never formed. As a result, the old ice was able to move freely in the Labrador Current from the Baffin Bay area towards the Labrador coast and eventually reach the Newfoundland waters.

The formation of an ice bridge is dependant on air temperatures and wind speed observed over the Nares Strait area. Based on Environment Canada’s Canadian Ice Service records since 1968, there is only one other year where the bridge was not present in April: 1993.

Anyway, I do understand your viewpoint in leaving unspoken
my taboo subject of the “red dots”
(I doubt that anyone -other than myself-
will stick his neck out on this one)–

But it has been the red dots that brought me to this blog–
My point of view is
that I never would have written
anything in this blog (or probably have even seen this blog)
had I not serendipiditously started observing the
red dots on this ice chart.
I previously had no interest in
global warming before seeing those amazing red dots.

I believe those red dots to be the most significantly
visible evidence of deliberate anthropomorphic
anthropogenic efforts intended to
skew the data, and graphs and promote
the AGW agenda–

The vast area extent and repeated execution
of the icebreaker manuevers required to produce this
sea ice slicing and trimming
(evidenced by the red dots
forming lines and curves and also the sliced sea ice slabs)
cannot possibly be related to shipping–
unless complete removal of sea ice
from all areas of the
Hudson’s Bay is the intent(removal
of sea ice from the Baffin/Newfoundland Bay labrador
area is first needed
so that the Hudson’s Bay ice slicing and flushing may
proceed
unimpeded by Baffin/Newfoundland Bay Labrador sea ice).
Because complete removal of sea ice is not
necessary for arctic shipping and is
merely a very expensive AGW perk.

For the next two months arctic shipping
(and its several hundred ice armored vessels)
will not be active in Hudson’s bay and
Labrador Sea.

And yet those straight and curved
lines of red dots will be proliferating
in those areas and not elsewhere
(except a few in the Russian icebreaker areas)
and the ice will be disappearing from those areas
while still growing elsewhere in the arctic.

The volume of effort and the thousands of miles
over which these icebreakers
traverse (as evidenced by the red dots)
cannot possibly
have any rational relationship to
the necessities of arctic shipping–

Clearing the entire Hudson’s bay
of ice every year by slicing it for flushing
does not seem to serve a commercial purpose.

(nor am I minimizing the equal
or greater overall
effects of arctic shipping itself on
the arctic ice cover —
my point is that the intent
of arctic shipping is commercial profit
and not to produce unnecessary unprofitable transits —
whereas the Feb March April activities of the
icebreakers appear to have no commercial purpose-)

Also it appears that in these animations –
-because of the reduced size of these animated maps–
the red dots are being replaced by blue dots or blue lines–
and the rapid repeated placement of these lines
cannot have any natural explanation-
–only the theory of multiple rapid icebreaker
transits does seem to fit the bill —
showing that the intent
has been to insure that Hudson’s Bay is recorded
as being ice free once again every year —

An additional note is the unnatural sharp
right angle today appearing(it appears every year
about this time and is maintained until Hudson’s Bay
is cleared of ice) at the mouth of
Bay of Ungava and Hudson Strait
and also the unnatural straight line
extending from the mouth
of that gulf accross the Baffin/Newfoundland Bay
labrador sea almost to the Greenland coast–
these also seems to be part of the yearly
effort to clear Hudson’s Bay of ice and
encourage flushing of sea ice-
by trimming that line and angle, sea ice from Baffin/Newfoundland Bay
Labrador sea is cut adrift and prevented from entering
or reentering or blocking the Ungava Gulf
and Hudson’s Bay

Such a right angle and straight line are
totally unnatural and can only be maintained by
constant icebreaker activity.

The Canadian govt is extremely reticent
about the activities of its icebreakers at this time of year-
not surprising when the money is being wasted
on artificially generating “proof” of
politically motivated AGW “facts”.

And by the way, these red dot activities do correlate very well with
the Hudson’s Bay sea ice graphs from Cryosphere Today

That is to say, Hudson’S Bay Sea ice increases are invariably followed
by immediate increased red dot activity followed by immediate
graph reduction of Hudson’s Bay sea ice totals–
producing that jagged sawtooth appearance of the graph.

This is especially evident since the overall total arctic sea ice is
steadily expanding with few irregularities in other areas
at this time of year.

I exclude satellite anomalies as the source
of the red dots based upon
the red dots unique singularity and restriction to
Hudson’S Bay and Baffin/Newfoundland Bay
Labrador sea locations and their correlation with
the known yearly migration of the Canada
icebreaker fleet through those areas.

Yeah, I think not. In fact you posit warming as a likely cause of the extinctions, but attribute it to “lava flows/volcanism/impact” (talk about grasping at straws!)

I can only suggest you read what the paleoclimatologists have to say on the subject. The real scientists paint a very different picture of the Permian–Triassic extinction event than your wishful thinking here.
————————
Reply:
That’s laughable, Robert. Besides, you’re not even a scientist–you’re a physician! Physicians aren’t scientsits (aren’t you guys in the employ of big pharma? I’m pretty sure that’s the way it is).

And I’d put a bunch of geologists up against your “paleoclimatologists” any day; the earth has been hit with asteroids that have left astroblems in a manner similar to the moon (or do you ignore what scared face of the moon just so you can make a convenient excuse for global warming?)

The earth has seen volcanism far more powerful than anything you can conjur up in the name of “global warming”.

You, sir, are no scientist, and the “experts” you refer to have so skewed the science that you’re not worth discussing things scientific anymore.

I believe those red dots to be the most significantly visible evidence of deliberate anthropomorphic anthropogenic efforts intended to skew the data, and graphs and promote the AGW agenda–

Even if AWG-promotion was not the intent of this increased icebreaker activity, the increase should be “corrected for” in calculating Arctic ice extent in the past ten years. (I.e., since the increase began.)

Such a correction would put a big “arrow” in the alarmist “elephant.” Questions should be asked in parliament–or at least in the National Post.

If it can ever be shown that AGW-promotion was a partial purpose of this activity — Wow! (“Breakergate”)

Mike Odin (17:42:45) :
The Canadian govt is extremely reticent
about the activities of its icebreakers at this time of year-
not surprising when the money is being wasted
on artificially generating “proof” of
politically motivated AGW “facts”.

So reticent in fact that you can get a complete plot of their movements!

There is a sovereignty issue at play in the far north, as the US and Russia, Denmark want to claim the resources under the sea bed, so I think the increased activity is a way to re-inforce Canadian ownership of the Arctic Islands.

“For the alarmists, the Arctic ice melt in 2007 was incontrovertible ‘proof’ of AGW. Now that the Arctic ice extent is back to more normal levels – and in a El Nino year! – the alarmists say nothing.”

I believe this event also seemed to say the same thing to anyone at that time who accepted AGW to be a probable scientific fact. I recall a news bulletin saying that an area of ice “the size of the state of California” had melted for the first time in history.

Now, it is three years later and the AMSR-E plot shows a winter sea-ice recovery to a typical decade average for this time of year. The ‘hockey stick’ attempt to hide the medieval warm period and the discovery that the danger of the CO2 greenhouse effect appears to have been greatly overstated in the popular press leads me to believe that the science behind this claim is faulty. For many, Climategate may be the final straw.

However, judging by accounts in the elite press, the AGW express still seems to be lumbering down the tracks even though it has a big hole in the boiler and the chief engineer is missing.

The article main article above is heartening as it is evidence of climate research that appears to attribute abnormal 2007 polar ice melt to natural causes. At this time I am prepared to give ice-breakers (an interesting speculation above) the benefit of the doubt because I believe that sea-ice tends to fuse under compression.

“For the alarmists, the Arctic ice melt in 2007 was incontrovertible ‘proof’ of AGW. Now that the Arctic ice extent is back to more normal levels – and in a El Nino year! – the alarmists say nothing.”

I believe this event also seemed to say the same thing to anyone at that time who accepted AGW to be a probable scientific fact. I recall a news bulletin saying that an area of ice “the size of the state of California” had melted for the first time in history.

Now, it is three years later and the AMSR-E plot shows a winter sea-ice recovery to a typical decade average for this time of year.

But it isn’t “back to more normal levels”, AMSR-E shows that it’s currently tracking 2007 and well below the long-term average.

The article main article above is heartening as it is evidence of climate research that appears to attribute abnormal 2007 polar ice melt to natural causes. At this time I am prepared to give ice-breakers (an interesting speculation above) the benefit of the doubt because I believe that sea-ice tends to fuse under compression.

The “interesting speculation” is from someone who apparently thinks that the red pixels on a false color map are the result of the canadian icebreakers cutting up the ice into small pieces so that they can more easily be blown away! When the ice bridge in the Nares Strait breaks floes of thick ice a few miles across come sailing down the strait at ~60miles/day, even the icebreakers run for cover when that happens. This all apparently takes place with a handful of icebreakers to cover the whole Canadian Arctic!http://www.ccg-gcc.gc.ca/e0004410http://www.ccg-gcc.gc.ca/eng/CCG/Ice_Fleet

“During the winter, icebreaking services are provided in the following periods and locations:

on the Labrador Coast, between October 15 and December 15, and between May 15 and July 15.
on the North East and East Coast of Newfoundland, between January 1 and May 15.
in the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Cabot Strait to Scatarie Island, between December 21 and April 29.
on the St. Lawrence and Saguenay Rivers, between December 15 and April 15.
in the Great Lakes, between December 20 and April 20, except for Lake Ontario, where icebreaking is not provided between December 25 and March 19.
During the summer months, icebreaking services are provided in the Canadian Arctic in the following periods and locations:

Hudson Bay and Strait and Frobisher Bay, between July 3 and October
Foxe Basin, between August 20 and September 15.
Davis Strait and Baffin Bay, between July 3 and October 15.
Parry Channel and Pelly Bay, between August 10 and October 15.
High Arctic, between August 24 and September 5.
Western Arctic, between July 10 and October 6.”

Note that the icebreakers don’t operate in Hudson Bay at the time the earlier poster ascribed the “jagged sawtooth appearance of the graph” to their activities.

RE: Phil. (06:53:04) : “icebreakers…”
Good information. Again, I seriously doubt that icebreaker trails pose a hazard to the stability of the Arctic ice pack.

RE: “But it isn’t ‘back to more normal levels,’…”

The AMSR-E data for late February 2010 (red curve) does seem to show a near midrange value for data taken from 2003 to 2010. I am primarily curious to see if the general melting trend of the last thirty years may have been halted by the grand solar minimum of 2008-2009 or by the recently reported mysterious 10% reduction of stratospheric water vapor. The jury is still out on this as we also seem to have an El Niño in progress.

Notice the 2 new slabs of sea ice
(size of new England)
which have begun separating off near
that artificial sea ice notch at the mouth of
the Bay of Ungava-next to Baffin/Newfoundland Sea–
The red dots continue to record
the continued unabated slicing and lopping off of huge slabs of
sea ice by icebreakers in the
baffin newfoundland
Bay of Ungava area —
which is currently
mysteriously losing sea ice (see below)
WHILE THE SEA ICE IN THE REMAINDER OF THE ARCTIC CONTINUES TO GROW.

At any rate some doth protest much too much over
a few remote red dots–and that in itself
is a big red
flag clue as to their
elevated significance.

And a few questions of veracity have
subtly been raised by insisting upon the
veracity of the
canada govt websites.
(you seem totally clueless that
the foundation of WUWT is challenging the
veracity of govt websites. Shame on you.)

And so, in reply to those intent on diverting
from the very important red dots we say this–

Some seem to think that if you simply say the
icebreakers are not there we must believe you–
or if you find some govt internet link
that claims they are not there it must be believed
(in fact virtually every warmist link has been
proven corrupted).

And please do not place the Canada govt above suspicion–
a canada govt whose veracity you
now have indeed subtly trumpeted
with your claim of the veracity
of its websites.

In fact, if the prime minister himself swore there were no
icebreakers there, that would have
less value than his busted
promises to never deliver a deficit budget–

Do you believe that if these icebreakers were sent
on a joint usa mission under secrecy that anyone
(except perhaps yourself) would be able
to legally identify such missions–
Do you admit such arcic missions have occurred in the past
(much to the
detriment of Canadian sovereignty)?–
and do you admit that public knowlwdge of such
secret missions is banned–

Do you admit that Canada is currently operating
under martial law and censorhip and detention orders
and that terrorist threats-
including those possibly from the arctic-
are a prime concern of and in constant
seething discussion in the current Canada govt–
And are you aware that AGW has been considered a terror threat?
or do you pretend that non of this exists
because denying it supports your argument
of an “honest”Canada govt posting on it’s website.

-I’ll bet you even claim that the whistler olympic
luge run was “accidently” made too steep, too fast,
and too dangerous
(after a hundred years of other countries getting it right)
and not inspired by a conniving duplicitous Canada govt
trying to get records and medals for its own crew–

You also forget that it was a Canadian who ran the entire
deceptive intelligence program for the allies in WW2.

And finally you have not provided
even the vaguest notion of an alernative
source for the red dots and the obviously
sliced off ice slabs.

You should seriously doubt any material placed on
any Canada govt website
(it is certainly fortunate that
Anthony et al doubted quite a few govt promulgations)

In your pomposity you are either being specious or
you impute too much honesty to a canadian govt that has
repeatedly displayed its foundations of
deceit, deception and dishonesty–
No you cannot promote the veracity of a
rump dictator canadian govt(with its 30 percent
of the popular vote and its current martial law)
without expecting its veracity to be challenged.

-It is you who have placed its veracity on the table
as an issue not I –So now the issue must be fully examined.

Do not pretend to hide behind
the skirts of canada patriotism.
If you have any any any alternative explanation
to icebreakers, let us hear it —

This is about explanations and science-
not about why we should not question what
the govt claims is happening.
stay on topic–
you PRESENT NO explanation of a
phenomonon which you admit exists–
my theory is as good as any.

This post speaks for itself, note that Newfoundland Lynx is a trawler, not an icebreaker, and is used by Canada as a Volunteer Observing Ship as part of the WMO program. “A selected ship is equipped with sufficient certified meteorological instruments for making observations, transmits regular weather reports and enters the observations in meteorological logbooks. It should have at least a barometer, a thermometer for sea-surface temperature, a psychrometer and a barograph.”

Thank you so much for now admitting
(although pompously)
that that this “trawler”
which I located for you and which you had
serendipitously previously neglected to notice
(and which you now wish to belittle as
too innocuous to be an ice disrupter)
is presently in an area of high ice danger in which
you previously claimed it was too dangerous and off limits
to Canadian icebreakers.

perhaps you would like to now indicate
what escort icebreakers(privately owned
or perhaps from iceland or Norway
or GASP usa) might be (secretly?) accompanying it?

And who says that only CanadIan Icebreakers
are involved here or only in that immediate location–
could be iceland or Norway or private
or GASP usa icebreakers swarming throughout
Baffin/Newfoundland Sea area —
after all you did neglect to point out this
one little old “trawler” which just happens
to be as big(210 feet) as many Canada icebreakers and
has a hull which appears designed to ride over ice —
and which is owned not by fishermen but by
a company which hires its boats out to Canada for
surveys and research n such,

And now to the vessel itself–You subtly
imply that it is some ponderous scow
(you always leave the important thing unspoken–
leaving vague implications) dedicated
catching fish when it in fact it is
owned by a
“company of Naval Architects and Marine Surveyors.
. . PMC has served the . . . oil and gas industry,
commercial shipping, governmental agencies”

Anyway you still insist on total veracity of all
government information sources
which really has no traction on this website.
Do you claim all plots of USA naval vessel
positions are public?
Ridiculous

And trawlers–well any personnel from any navy
is fully aware of the the wide use
trawlers for semi-military purposes
not involving the catching of fish

And still you avoid mentioning your theory of
why slabs of ice in the area of the”trawler”
are being sliced off.
So let’s hear it or will be back to attacking the messenger?

Its still about the red dots and
slabs of ice
not why you think the boat(s) in the area
are innocent.

Thank you so much for now admitting
(although pompously)
that that this “trawler”
which I located for you and which you had
serendipitously previously neglected to notice
(and which you now wish to belittle as
too innocuous to be an ice disrupter)
is presently in an area of high ice danger in which
you previously claimed it was too dangerous and off limits
to Canadian icebreakers.

It’s a trawler providing weather information and is not part of the Canadian Coast Guard fleet. I made no claim that any area was too dangerous and off limits to Canadian icebreakers, I just pointed readers to the information regarding their areas and dates of operation.

And now to the vessel itself–You subtly
imply that it is some ponderous scow

No such implication, I called it what it’s listed as, a trawler, as for a picture on page 34 of the following you’ll see a photo of the Newfoundland Lynx in dock for repairs, showing a hull totally unsuited for icebreaking!http://www.ffaw.nf.ca/PDF/Forum%20-%20Nov-Dec%202008.pdf
It’s even mentioned in a parliamentary debate on the fishing industry in 2006:
“Why not put it there that they cannot sell any of their boats, any of their draggers which are worth millions of dollars today, I add? Go downtown. There was one down there, the Newfoundland Lynx, tied up on the apron in the harbour for the last month.”

And still you avoid mentioning your theory of
why slabs of ice in the area of the”trawler”
are being sliced off.

Just passed through the Ungaro Gulf into Hudson’s Bay
without the assistance of those pansy canadian icebreakers
who you claim are not permitted into this dangerous
ice area for another 2 months–even though
not labeled as an icebreaker it goes where
icebreakers fear to tread –
at least that is the claim of some–

Well the minus 25 C temps quickly closed up
“Arctic”‘s red dot trail,
but it likely did its bit to disturb
the sea ice and no doubt the
hudson flush will be easier due
to the Arctic’s efforts–
I think she could be headed right
through the NW Passage ahead of the icebreakers–

So when the Canadian govt says that their
Coast guard does not sail arctic waters
at this time of the year they are lying
in that they pretend that everything stops when Canada stops
and pretend to be unaware of other
big boats zipping around the arctic (which may
actually be manned by Canada personnel-Coast guard
Navy or Civilian pilots)
including some boats the Canada Govt has leased and controls.

And if there is this much undisclosed arctic
marine traffic now in February —
it is logical to conclude that the undisclosed
traffic will be rapidly multiplying in the coming months
tearing up the sea ice.